The Sunday Gleaner begins a new series today looking at innovations in farming. Many small farmers have overcome many hurdles to achieve success, and we will tell their stories.

Gareth Manning, Sunday Gleaner Writer

'REUSE', 'RECYCLE', 'reduce' are pet words that Patricia Isaacs employs on her 300-plus acres farm in the cool valley of Claremont, St Ann.

The only producer of baby corn in Jamaica, Isaacs, a former restaurateur, has created a niche market for herself, supplying hotels and restaurants.

And that has not been her only innovation.

The assertive business woman is the sole female farmer highlighted in a Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute publication recently for her farm's innovative move to develop a hydroponics system for growing crops. It's a system which utilises a nutrient solution rather than soil for cultivation.

However, shortly after Isaacs started, the operating system became challenging for the first-time farmer. But, like a good business woman, when one system fails, she simply tries another.

"Since I have fish (which is her main produce), I am going to do 'aquaponics', which is when you use the water from the fish pond to grow crops," Isaacs proudly tells The Sunday Gleaner.

The process

How will this work? By channelling water from the ponds into troughs about a 100 feet long and about six feet wide. Seedlings will be placed on foam to germinate and then transferred to troughs for growth.

"Through the foam, the seedlings absorb the water. You don't waste a lot of water because what happens is the water comes from the fish straight into the trough. It circulates the plants, takes up the nutrients and it goes back to the fish, and the fish gain from the plants, and plants gain, from the fish," Isaacs explains.

It's a win-win situation in many respects - the farmer saves water and the fish and the crops gain from the added nutrients that circulate from the pond to the trough.

And to make the system even more economical, Isaacs will be using rain water, which she already harvests for her pond.

The system won't be too expensive to set up because she already has the fish. It costs, at most, about $200,000 to build 10 troughs, but it will need a lot of attention.

"What you have to do is build the troughs with some cement and steel and you are going to need pipes," she says.

Throw in a full solar-energy unit and you have a farm working at even greater efficiency.

Isaacs' farm is fully solar generated. It's not a cheap system to buy, she explains, but it's worth the benefits in the long run.

"We have solar and if we don't have enough sun we have a back-up generator," she says.

Isaacs believes if small farmers had more access to funding and grants to invest in more efficient forms of production, like she is doing, there would be no boundaries to the amount of food the island's agricultural sector could produce for local consumption and export.

"It's very expensive to maintain. I can't stress enough that we need more access to grants if we are going to be efficient," she tells The Sunday Gleaner.

"And the farmers need to know that these grants are available. Sometimes we don't know about them and people who are friends of friends know about these things. People who want to move the industry ahead, they should have opportunities to get some of these grants," she adds.

Explaining further about her baby-corn production, Isaacs says it is easy to plant and within 60 days it is ready for reaping.

"When we plant, we plant four or five acres and they (the two major hotels she supplies) buy a lot," she says.

No waste

High demand means a lot of waste is produced by Isaac's crop of baby corn. But like most of her produce on the farm, the waste is not ... wasted.

Self-sufficiency is practised by this Guyanese native.

The trash from her baby corns is crushed and mixed with chicken manure and reused as fertiliser for the crop coming up.

"You can say what I run here is an environmentally friendly farm," she says. And that's for certain. Use is created for ever bit of waste.

Isaacs recently set up a piggery to use the trash generated from her vegetable garden.

"We don't allow anything to be wasted and at the same time, you earn more income," she explains.